“Feed Your Reader” Firefox Feed Extension

When Firefox added RSS support, I had mixed reactions. On the one hand, I was excited by the boost RSS would receive by being supported in a popular browser. But on the other hand, for obvious reasons I wasn’t wild about how Firefox built RSS into the browser without enabling users to choose an external RSS reader.

So, I was glad when several FeedDemon customers talking about building an extension to enable FeedDemon to take advantage of the new Firefox RSS features.

Michael Koziarski rose to the challenge and created Feed Your Reader, a Firefox extension that enables you to skip the “Live Bookmarks” feature and instead subscribe to a feed in FeedDemon – or any other RSS reader that supports the feed:// protocol. Which means that even though the extension was designed with FeedDemon in mind, it’s not specific to FeedDemon. For example, initial tests show that it also works with NetNewsWire on the Mac.

Once this extension is installed, you’ll see an additional “FYR” icon in Firefox’s status bar right next to the existing RSS icon. Clicking the FYR icon displays a menu of auto-discovered feeds, and clicking one of these feeds will display FeedDemon’s “New Channel” wizard to subscribe to it.

Details on Feed Your Reader are here, and the project page is here. If you’re viewing this in Firefox, the download link to the XPI (extension) is here.

My thanks to Michael for taking the time to create this very useful extension!

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13 thoughts on ““Feed Your Reader” Firefox Feed Extension”

Hi,
this is great news. Firebirds (and for that matter Thunderbirds) RSS-Support is nowhere near there where FeedDaemon is. Not even remotely.
So this extension comes in very handy.
Thanks for the news.
Philip

[via Nick Bradbury] Cool! Wishlist: allow an option to support http://www.bloglines.com/sub/ instead of feed: instructions on how to remove the current icon, making this a replacement instead of an addition replaceable icon – to me it makes sense to

Phillip- I guess you meant “Firefox” and not “Firebird”, hey?! ;-)
Nick- When are we going to be able to use Gecko as the integrated rendering engine for FeedDemon? (and I mean officially supported) That would alleviate the temptation to use Thunderbird for RSS for me personally.
However, I must say that FeedDemon is _WAY_ ahead of Thunderbird. Still, since I use Linux and Windows it is getting harder to resist the tug of the ‘bird… ;-)
Cheers,
Kevin.

Feed Your Reader Blog
Feed Your Reader Download
FYR is a Firefox 1.0 extension that works just the same as the RSS button in the status bar of the new Firefox upgrade.
Works with all RSS Readers that recognize the fee:// protocol

Kevin, Firefox is my browser of choice, so I would *love* to be able to offer full support for Gecko inside FeedDemon. But this just isn’t feasible until the Mozilla team starts taking the Mozilla ActiveX control seriously. As it stands, there are too many problems with it for me to offer it as a fully supported feature.

Hi Nick
I use FireFox precisely because it doesn’t support ActiveX. Perhaps I have an unreasonable belief that it is a security hole-waiting-to-happen-and-often-does.
Is there no other way of getting Mozilla to work with FeedDaemon?
John

John, hundreds of Windows applications use ActiveX controls. The major security issues with ActiveX controls are when they’re run inside your browser, not when they’re used inside desktop applications.

This Google search led to this post from Nick Bradbury, which led to this extension for Firefox: Feed Your Reader. With proper link credit given, let’s carry on to why this find might be important to you (after a short background explanation). Firefox’…

This Google search led to this post from Nick Bradbury, which led to this extension for Firefox: Feed Your Reader. With proper link credit given, let’s carry on to why this find might be important to you (after a short background explanation). Firefox’…

This Google search led to this post from Nick Bradbury, which led to this extension for Firefox: Feed Your Reader. With proper link credit given, let’s carry on to why this find might be important to you (after a short background explanation). Firefox’…